>Subject: New Virus, real bad stuff ( WARNING:)As the bowl of petunias said, "Oh, no! Not again!"
>If you receive an email with a file called ${ATTACHMENT} attached, do not
>open the file. The file contains the ${VIRUSNAME} virus.
${ATTACHMENT} can be any sort of harmless-sounding name. ${VIRUSNAME} usually
is something with a hackish air to it.
>This information was announced yesterday morning from ${VERY_BIG_CO_1};
This sentence seems to occur in practically every one of these things, with
no more variation than in which company is used to give the air of authority.
Sometimes it's Microsoft, sometimes Big Blue that the virus is announced
"from" (never "by"!!!). And never is it a known authority on virus attacks,
such as Symantec(Norton); *definitely* never the CERT, since the average
casual computer user (who is the real target of these viruses), not
recognizing the reference, would not be sufficiently terrorized to forward
the message, thus spreading the 'virus' under the delusion that he is
preventing it.
>${VERY_BIG_CO_2} states that this is a very dangerous virus, much worse
>than "Melissa", and that there is NO remedy for it at this time.
Don't know why this is, but, in every case I have seen, ${VERY_BIG_CO_2}
is different from the one that made the initial "announcement".
The only reason I can guess is that the names are used to provide an air of
seeming authority. The actual companies named never said anything like
this, of course.
>Some very sick individual has succeeded in using the reformat function >from Norton Utilities causing it to completely erase all documents on >the hard drive.A question that comes to mind is, "Why not use the reformat facility that comes with the operating system? Not everybody is going to have Norton." But of course, this statement does not represent anything real; it's only here to provide a technical-sounding patina to the warning. A second one is, "Why just the documents? Why not do something REALLY nasty and go for the Windows registry?" (assuming that Windows systems are the targets, of course).
>It has been designed to work with >${EVERY_BROWSER_YOU_EVER_HEARD_OF}.
>It destroys ${SEVERAL_WILDLY_INCOMPATIBLE_COMPUTER_TYPES}.
Real programmers double up in fits when they read sentences like these.
It ain't no walk in the park to write one program that works with everything.
>This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it.Because, when this same message flooded half the mail servers on the Internet last week, it had a different set of names in it. It was announced "from Apple" that time; the virus erased all the ${SOMETHING_OR_OTHER} on ${SEVERAL_WILDLY_INCOMPATIBLE_COMPUTER_TYPES}, yada, yada, yada
Trust me. We've seen it.
>Pass this warning along to EVERYONE in your address >book and please share it with all your online friends ASAP so that this >threat may be stopped.And this is how the *real* 'virus' spreads. At least Melissa emailed everybody in your address book without human help.
When you forward messages like this, YOU have been infected with the real 'virus' and you're giving it to others.